Something Completely Different

The BBC is putting its vast archives online for free. Call it the next media model.

There's no copyright at NASA. It's a federal agency, and the government cannot legally hold any copyright. You can download and reproduce some of the most expensive photographs in history from one of the richest public storehouses on the planet. As long as you don't imply that NASA is a big fan of the nightclub or credit card you're advertising, you're good to go. File-share all the pictures of Neil Armstrong you want.

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Sadly, this digital openness doesn't extend very far into the public infosphere. The great private and even nonprofit archives of knowledge – TV news databases, magazine and newspaper articles, millions of books, public radio and television shows – are nowhere to be found online (except, occasionally, for a high price). In other words, the great promise of the digital age – that the intellectual and cultural riches of the world would be indexed and downloadable – is not even close to a reality. Vast swaths of the information landscape remain uncharted.

But that may be about to change, and – stay with me here – the British Broadcasting Corporation is leading the way. This summer, BBC director-general Greg Dyke quietly announced that the Beeb has decided to digitize and release its enormous archive of material to the public, who would then be able to download, mix, and burn the stuff at will. With the encouragement and advice of Stanford law professor and Creative Commons guru Lawrence Lessig (who's also a Wired columnist) and Internet Archive cofounder Brewster Kahle, the BBC is planning to make it as easy as possible to license and upload everything from David Attenborough's nature documentaries to Winston Churchill's speeches. Some of the classic comedy and musical performances of the past may go up, though don't expect Monty Python for a while.

For the 81-year-old publicly funded network known as Auntie, this is hot stuff. But the implications go far beyond the United Kingdom. If the BBC delivers on its vision – the plan remains a bit on the fuzzy side – it will establish a model that could be followed by governments, nonprofits and even other media giants. What started as a project aimed at fulfilling a mandate to serve the British public could end up showing the world how to put the information in the information age. And even if the Beeb does nothing more than create a legal and practical framework for digitizing and distributing content, the landscape will change.

Not that it will be easy or cheap. There's the sheer engineering task of digitizing and sharing an enormous backlog of audio, video, and text. Kahle estimates that the digitizing would cost about $15 per hour of taped material, which translates to about $100,000 for a year's worth of one channel.

But innovation should cut some of the cost, and distribution could be nearly free. One small group of BBC execs has already floated an ingenious notion: P2P networks. Why spend money on racks of hardware and fat pipes when your most popular files will be shared by your viewers, who will burn them onto DVDs themselves and create their own copies to match demand? How much does the RIAA pay to have its files load-balanced, cached, and redistributed by Kazaa? That's how much the BBC will pay. Even a partial archive would place an impossible burden on the BBC's infrastructure, so open licenses will make the Creative Archive possible.

Such a scheme has its own problems, of course. To redistribute material, you need the copyright holder's permission. For stuff produced in the future, the BBC could start fresh with some flavor of a Creative Commons license, which allows writers, artists, and other rights holders to give away their work without having their intellectual property claimed and resold. Material from the vault will be tougher. Thanks to the increasingly baroque way rights are parceled out, most programs are mired in a mess of rights tied to reproductions. Redistributing any part of the more modern archive requires carefully scrubbing every copyright through the Beeb's legal department. Just getting an OK to show 30-second clips of Fawlty Towers on Vodafone handsets this summer was hailed as groundbreaking. To allow others to redistribute, the network will need to find a new model – a modified Creative Commons license, a blanket deal with rights holders – to simplify the issue. It's a daunting task, but if the BBC can manage to do the heavy lifting, the load will be lighter for all who follow.

And here's where the model starts to get really interesting. If it's done well, the Creative Archive will stimulate a huge community of avid open source coders who will, in turn, find surprising ways to mine and exploit the treasure trove of material. Long-forgotten documentaries, science programs, and investigative reports will suddenly be searchable, scene by scene, word by word. Imagine Google instantly calling up Dennis Potter's final interview. New works, based on the old, will spring up. The creative world will get a bank of material to work from, the likes of which haven't been seen since copyright law stoppered the growth of the public domain in the '70s.

Everyone will benefit – even the rest of the media world. Although big media won't be allowed to repurpose the BBC's works as much as the public will (redistribution will be strictly noncommercial), it will benefit in other ways. At first, major players – yes, we're talking about PBS, CNN, CBS, Telemundo, even Sky TV – could use these archiving and indexing tools to improve access to their own material.

But if the BBC's experiment succeeds, the other networks may discover that there are hidden benefits to sharing material that otherwise would be inert and inaccessible. Right now, it's hard for these companies to see the advantages of unlocking their archives – especially when the only people they see doing it are being pilloried by the MPAA and hunted down by the RIAA.

When it's a large media company – one of their own – using this model to its benefit, throwing open the archives begins to look a little more attractive. Perhaps even a competitive necessity.

That's a faraway dream. Like NASA, the BBC will open its archives because it has a public duty to do so and, like NASA, because it doesn't have to worry about making money. Publicly owned institutions can inspire corporate media. Archives have value, the trick is extracting it. One small step for the BBC could be a giant leap for information freedom.